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Should You Wear a Wedding Ring to an Interview?

Despite identifying as a strong independent woman, I feared wearing my wedding ring to a job interview because of the way some may perceive it.
Should You Wear A Wedding Ring To An Interview?
[social_warfare]

Despite identifying as a strong independent woman, I feared wearing my wedding ring to a job interview.

wedding ring

This article by Kate Van Dellen, SWE Member, was first published on The Huffington Post.

My wedding ring was the first ring that I’ve worn on that finger (no engagement ring). I was so proud of the man I married, yet still harbored something inside me that felt less valuable to this work team because I was a married woman.

Thoughts raced through my head about potential bosses not wanting me because a married woman might pop out a kid at any time (single women have working ovaries too you know) and maybe couldn’t be a full team player in their eyes. I wondered if instead of hearing that I grew tired of living in hotel rooms in my last job that they would translate it to mean I wasn’t up for a challenge and that I had settled into stable family life.

The worst part of the interview was feeling like I was staring in the mirror, with only one slight difference. Through my network, I knew one of my interviewers was only a couple years older than I, and he was also recently married. I was on a similar path as the interviewer, only he was male. It tore me up inside because I doubt he carried my same fear of being viewed as less valuable based on his marital status. Statistically speaking, married men make 11 percent more money than their single counterparts. So his recent vows might just give him a leg up in the workplace, meanwhile I was worried about falling into the statistic that shows employers prefer childless women.

Just hours before my interview I sat spinning my wedding band, contemplating what it meant if I took it off and how easy it would be to just slip it into my coin purse. I was so newly married that the ring hadn’t worn a pattern in my finger yet. It would have been so easy to be someone else. Then I was reminded of wise words a friend told me: choosing to be your authentic self feels so much better than trying to fit into something you are not. I am a married woman. I know that at the end of the work day that I want to come home and bask in the fact that I got to be myself all day without wearing a mask.

So I went into the interview with renewed self-confidence, properly installed ring (engineering joke), but knowing in the back of my head that the interviewers may not want me because I might be seen as an eminent baby-making-machine. And if they did see me in the way I feared? Then it wasn’t a place I wanted to give my time and talent. After all, an interview goes both ways. I could not like this job for as many reasons as they potentially didn’t like me.

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